Ea gigantic actress. The biggest one. The funniest anyway. The most tragic and violent too. Today she is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But it is a shame of fate that one can only speak of the presence of sparks in all theater colors in the imperfect tense since a bad illness finally drove her off the stage a few years ago.
A Kirsten Dene would do the theater badly. As an example of great art. As the superior counterweight of a magically imaginative, text-loving construction lover – against the common morally pale text and character-hostile squadrons of deconstruction and identity pottering away.
Absolute prima donna
Like her, the prima donna assoluta of the Peymann ensembles in Stuttgart, Bochum and (above all!) Vienna, with her eminent voice, a paradox of gentleness and aggression, a raw alto on a gold background as if on vibrating strings of cooing and cooing, bashful curls and brute seduction ensnared her characters; she loved; she courted shot her ready to storm with her inimitable eroton verve; helped them lead hilarious, more adventurous lives; seized her with her soul art fangs and whirled up; no despiser of the playwrights, rather her wondrous accomplice – from this, be honest!, all over the country, the always helpless, joyless and listless working mimes could benefit from learning from the great Dene.
Still noisy the Point
You went to the school of a giantess who always played with the fire of being overwhelmed, but who also paid the cost of tears in laughter and the comic dividend in tragedy in cash every second. Even if she didn’t do anything except bite into a cold Wiener Schnitzel every now and then and snarl and rave “A good schnitzel!” when she gave the tenderest of all Hermann Beils in Thomas Bernhard’s play “Claus Peymann und Hermann Beil auf der Sulzwiese”. ‘, she threw out the most evil punch lines, because they were rumbling insidiously and silently.
Theater could learn a lot from her today: Kirsten Dene
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Image: ddp
So the only thing that remains is the happiness of grateful Dene memories. To her Kunigunde in Kleist’s “Käthchen” (Stuttgart, 1977), how she, in ravishingly indecent tin prosthetic lingerie, wrapped Count Wetter vom Ray as a stripping myth lady in a seduction rope in the Bar zum Armen Ritter, in the cocoon of an intrigue spider woman. Or how she made the Teutonic bears dance as Peymann’s Thusnelda in Bochum’s “Hermannsschlacht” (1980). And then the figure pearl necklace of her dazzling power and juice women! For example as Leonore Sanvitale (“Tasso”, Bochum), as “Dene” in Bernhard’s “Ritter, Dene, Voss” (Salzburg), as a curiously rebellious creature of longing in Turrini’s “Alpenglühen” and “Schlacht um Wien”, as a maternal pill monster in “A Family” by Tracy Letts, as Schnitzler’s love-lost wife Wahl in “The Wide Land”, as the murderous Aunt Abby in “Arsenic and Lace Caps”, as Mrs. Alving, who sweeps away all life’s cobwebs wonderfully uninhibitedly in the “Ghosts” (all in Vienna) – there she was always surging through the stage like a battleship, which licked the others in a wonderful way, but in dignity and wit ran aground itself.
Completely unsentimental, but always heart-moving, human and overwhelmingly alive. If you had watched their art of transformation, you left richer and more gifted than you came. That was once. And miss so much.